Michi’s blog » archive for 'Python'

## A quick python hack for a mathematical puzzle

• November 12th, 2011
• 4:09 pm

So, today I saw this in my Twitter feed:

«Phil Harvey wants us to partition {1,…,16} into two sets of equal size so each subset has the same sum, sum of squares and sum of cubes.» — posted by @MathsJam and retweeted @haggismaths.

Sounds implausible was my first though. My second thought was that there aren’t actually ALL that many of those: we can actually test this.

So, here’s a short collection of python lines to _do_ that testing.

import itertools allIdx = range(1,17) sets = itertools.combinations(allIdx,8) setpairs = [(list(s), [i for i in allIdx if i not in s]) for s in sets] def f((s1,s2)): return (sum(s1)-sum(s2), sum(map(lambda n: n**2, s1))-sum(map(lambda n: n**2, s2)), sum(map(lambda n: n**3, s1))-sum(map(lambda n: n**3, s2)))

 

goodsets = [ss for ss in setpairs if f(ss) == (0,0,0)] 
And back comes one single response (actually, two, because the comparison is symmetric).

## Parallel and cluster computing with MPI4Py

• May 18th, 2008
• 11:46 am

First off, I’d ask your pardon for the lull in postings – this spring has been insane. It has been very much fun – traveling the world, talking about my research and meeting people I only knew electronically – and also very intense.

To break the lull, I thought I’d try to pick up what I did last summer: parallel computing on clusters. It’s been a bit of blog chatter about SAGE and how SAGE suddenly has transformed from a Really Good Idea to something that starts to corner out most other systems in usability and flexibility.

Matlab? SciPy bundled with SAGE and the Python integration seems to be at least as good, if not better.
Maple? Mathematica? Maxima? Singular? GAP? SAGE interfaces with all those that it doesn’t emulate.